it's pursuing a self directed path to higher learning a critic of the traditional higher education system he left college during the second semester and has been unschooling himself ever since he's also the recipient of the prestigious feel fellowship at a frequent commentator on education issues at the washington post the new york times and the huffington post his new book is called hacking your education ditch the lectures save tens of thousands and learn more than your peers ever will are pleased to welcome deal stephens from los angeles studio they'll welcome thank you thanks for joining us this country has some of the most important personage is supreme mobley competent educational institutions in the world people from all of the world for their kids here why is it that our college graduates can't find jobs in this today. one of the reasons is that it's incredibly expensive incredibly difficult as a young person to commit four years and hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars to going to a specific school when you haven't tried out different things and it's

a real travesty that the average student graduates now with twenty seven thousand dollars in debt which as a young person coming out and ring the workforce really limits your options and being able to go out and try different things you're forced to take a job that may not be ideal our may not actually use the skills that might have went to college but. pays you monies that you can pay back your loans right so if if kids are graduating with a lot of debt and the jobs that are out there are not appropriate to their skills. are you suggesting that the response to that should be that young people should just say screw it i'm not going to go to college. not that everyone i think it's as ridiculous to say that everyone should or should not go to college as it is to say that everyone should go to college but i think that people should take a long hard time to think about whether it makes sense spending four years in an institution whether that's the best way to learn certain skills institutions in the united states or are really disconnected from the skills that are actually being of

value in the workforce you know we were looking around and we need people who have technical skills who can build computers who can do things that have real value and yet we're sending everyone to college and we're producing people who who have english majors are studying art history is there though something to be said for for that art history or philosophy or english major in as much as from an employer's point of view it demonstrates that that person was willing to commit four years of their life to something that they had the ability to focus on it that they could they could keep with that that they you know it doesn't it. doesn't there's a growing number of employers there was one who was profiled recently on one of the national networks i think was a lot. herman said that even to be a secretary yet they have a b.a. they just won't talk to anybody who's not a graduate of four year college because just making it through those four years in

their mind said something about people. i think there's absolutely value in learning things that don't have like a direct utilitarian value but i'm not going i'm not convinced that it takes four years and i'm not convinced that that you should spend so much money doing so i think on the part of employers employers are getting to a point or are really soon at least where they're getting a thousand applicants for a job and all the thousand thousand applicants will have college degrees and at that point a college degree doesn't actually tell you much about the person sure it tells you that they went through college and spent four years there but when everyone else did it exactly the same it doesn't tell you anything about their skills with or their talents or or how they might fit into your company and worse and increasingly insult in value we're seeing people who are wanting to hire for people's actual skills and talents and i believe that that will soon be expanding to other technical fields as well so is your promise that people can develop their skills

and talents some people. better outside of college than within colleges at the essence of unschooling. the answer is the essence of unschooling is that there may be more efficient less expensive and more meaningful ways to learn outside of institutions and that's not to say that everyone should be unschooled there absolutely are ways that that school can be beneficial and there absolute ways that you can make your own experience in an institution be more self directed. and for example. for example if you're if you're in that situation you should take. as much advantage of that as you possibly can go to office hours find mentors find other students who are working on the same things and and create peer accountability groups take the opportunity to be self directed and start projects and start organizations and build your own portfolio do all of the things that will that will equip you to be a person who has relevant experience in the field that you want to get into by the

time you're out of college don't don't just start that once you finish school right and and. you know what is there a college personality or is it more of a college this is the kind of you know i want to be intellectual engineer so i know i have to go to college and learn electrical engineering or is there i mean hot in your mind and in your writing. how would a young person who is considered you know close to graduating from high school make that decision about whether they should take a couple years off whether they should go to college or whether they should be on school themselves learn perhaps the specific skill sets that they want in just part of a college education or a trade school or online or in books or whatever. how do you parse that and how do you sort that out. let's hear it if i were graduating from high school today instead of going to college i would take a couple of careers that i was potentially interested in and go and try and find

out what it's actually like to do those things find someone who works in those careers and ask if i can shadow them for a day or a week or a month and try to figure out a whether that's something that that that i would enjoy and b. what are the skills that i need to actually do that job and then and then see as myself what's the best way to learn those skills and the answer may well be in college but the answer also be some other way i think the that the really important lessons here is that i want people to stop and think long and hard about how they're learning. really the loss of one hundred on schooling is about making a conscious choice about how you're educating yourself how you do it is irrelevant but right now we aren't actually thinking about how we're learning we go to kindergarten we go to middle school we go to high school you go to college that ever stopping to think is this is this what suits me is this what's what's best for the interested and does this help for the right longer term goals you know in your own cause you know our own family one of our kids. read the book on schooling when

she was in high school and said ok that's it i'm out of here and we homeschooled her the last couple of years she traveled around the world with us and it worked out just fine i mean it also i can tell you you know. i'm not i don't claim any great academic credentials either so there's a lot that you can do outside of college. the i think it's go ahead. i think the idea of leaving the school is really scary for some people because that the perception is that if you leave school there's no safety net. but in reality there is a safe and that safe no school school school and college are not going away any time soon so if you do choose to take some time off the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you could go back right yeah yeah and i've you know i've seen the lives of people in my own family and a lot of people around me so. you describe non traditional learners as

academics what's academic. i have to make is someone who has figured out that they can make their own decisions and that they have an agency over their own learning and that's something that's really hard to figure out and really hard to learn if you spent twelve to sixteen years in a school system where you've been told what to do where you've been given grades where you've had people giving you the assignments i think one of the one of the biggest realizations that i had when i got to college and i went to a small private liberal arts school in arkansas for six months before i dropped out was understanding that school actually wasn't that hard i went to college expecting it to be much harder i thought that as a non school or i would have been grading myself very easily that that that college would be a much more academically rigorous environment and what i what i understood was that the the sheer amount of work that i had to do was actually cut cut by a third because no longer is i have to actually figure out what i was going to learn suddenly a teacher was giving me assignments nor did i have to evaluate my work on my own

and in collaboration with with peers and mentors someone else was was doing that for me and so i just had to try to write the assignments. that i think people people think that direction learning is is easy but it's not when you when you when you have to to to figure out what you're going to learn and then evaluate it those are two really critical parts of the learning process and to skills that you will use every day for the rest of your life that we never teach in school so what kind . resources are available for somebody who wants to do self directed education who wants to teach themselves what they feel that they need to know to be successful. as an on school or and i left school when i was twelve and i didn't go to middle school or high school i use the resources of the world around me to create an education that was everything from online classes to finding mentors to going to my local university to taking classes to finding interest based community groups art centers or pottery centers or things like that to go in and spending time abroad

and traveling and do it get doing it exchange programs that the resources are out there they're just they're just very distributed and not in one central place and that the challenge of self directed learning is figuring out how to find those resources and how to assemble them together into into one cohesive plan that works for you and how do you do that is there any are there any gateways or somebody's points or. nexus. the way that i learned how to do that was by connecting with with my group of local and schoolers and they provided a framework and a vocabulary and a structure for how to do that which is what i talk about. in my book and i encourage people to go and reach out to communities of of and schoolers near them to find an example of people who have set set the example of how to organize collaborative classes of how to go and find educational resources of how to create personal learning plans of how to find and connect with mentors because these are

all things that are that are integral to learning but but no one will ever. teach you outside of existing communities of learners and is good but there's there's not yet like a website or a site this is actually sounds like you could you could create the college of self directed learning we don't give degrees but will connect you with anything you want to know kind of thing i mean seems like a business opportunity if nothing else i mean the the group that i run on in college. does this to an extent and we try and point people in the directions of resources and in skills training we run weekend long workshops called academic camps where very we get together communities of self directed learners to work on these skills and this fall we're launching a got your program as well so we we do this to an extent. but. we're

we're not the only ones and we're not everywhere in the world well it's a great beginning it's a great story. i want to get into the question of whether our culture has just become. too rigid altogether you know there's this idea back in germany in elementary school. at least in eighty six when we when we lived in germany. in the second grade they were determining which kids would go to college which ones wouldn't and you know we're not. we haven't gone that far yet here in the united states but it seems like there's also a larger cultural issue here i'd like to explore that with you after the break that's ok but you're right it sounds good to get more conversations with great minds but deal steve.

let me let me i want to know we're going to let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we're having a debate we have our knives out. to do this right it's a bad thing never get here in this story we're being i don't want to talk about the surveillance me. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

isn't talking about the same story doesn't make it news no softball interviews no puff pieces i mean tough questions make it. worse if you're going through. white house to give a. radio. well if you've never seen anything like. it welcome back to conversations the great minds were talking with dale stephens

founder of unqualified and author of the new book hacking your education ditch the lectures save tens of thousands and learn more than your peers ever will still welcome back thank you we were we were talking in the last segment we as we as we hit the break i mentioned the system in germany. the. when we lived there back in the eighty's our youngest was in second grade literally and that was the year at least in that town in that part of northern bavaria where the decision was made whether you go to the the whole sure or the reality sure was i recall where the two horses whether you go on the trade school route or the college route it was very very rigid and very organized but there was this alternative of trade schools as well as college and for for kids who wanted to literally become bricklayers i mean bricklaying was a noble profession and it was a two year apprenticeship do what lessons can we learn from that is this is our

system fundamentally broken should we be looking at that. there are there are unquestionably downsides to filtering children out when they're when they're in second grade when we know that we know that kids don't stop developing until much later but i think the up side of that system and where we can learn from it is about the perception of other trades and i think one one one really dangerous thing about the so-called american dream of everyone can go to college and do anything is that. that's fundamentally not true right not not everyone can do everything maybe if you do a lot of work and you're persistent and you put some effort into it sure you can but just just going to class and turning it in your homework and getting a degree is is not going to make you successful i think it's really important in countries like germany that professions like bricklaying or or welding or being an electrician are professions that are that are that are both well respected and are accessible. and we're starting to see the resurgence of friendships in america as

well last year siemens announced that some of their factories some of the some of their technical trade skills that are needed the people who are doing them are retiring and so they started a friendship programs to train new welders and people in machine shops and there's a there's a whole. effort in the software development committee right now as well to develop people who are software apprentices is a company called called the boot camp in san francisco that is specifically working on this and they've got a a three month training program that helps place people with jobs and what's interesting about that is that they're getting a much better return the program costs about ten thousand dollars and at the end of three months there they're rajputs are getting jobs with an average starting salary of seventy nine thousand dollars which is a much better return on investment than going to college and spending one hundred

k. and then you know maybe actually using your culture degree yeah thirty years ago in the united states somebody would graduate from high school or not even and go to a tool and die shop for example or whatever you do i use that example i did work forty years until it dies and or thirty years and. you get a job an entry level job and then apply for apprenticeship and eventually get that upright. ship and go through a couple years of learning and then become a journeyman and when they became a journeyman their pay would radically go up and they basically have a job for life that was high quality high pay good benefits but it was the union that organized and without the machinist union you know i don't know that any of that would have come about in fact there was all this chaos that came out you know with the development of the industrial revolution in the united states in many ways the in the in the thirty's forty's and fifty's certainly the you know industry in

the united states was enthusiastically collaborating with the unions my my great uncle king used to be the editor of the news paper the weekly newspaper that was published by motor wheel which was a company in lansing michigan that made the wheels for general motors cars and it was a newspaper for labor and it talked about their products or programs or how to get into the but it was basically it was a collaboration between the union and the employer what has happened in america that that you know even the idea of that model you mentioned siemens seems a german company in germany if your company has more than a thousand employees fifty percent of your board has to be made up of labor members members of organized labor by law what has happened here in the united states that we've lost. i think one of the main things that has happened so and how might we get exactly. yet sit sixty years ago there was there was the g.i.

bill right that promised everyone coming back from war to that that they could have a college education and so we have the is tens of thousands of people that we shipped off to college but then didn't really know what to do with them and i think i think that was the thing that started the trend of everyone going to college and you know no matter what you're going to do you should go to college and get a degree and then the cost of the costs cycle i think became vicious coming out of the seventy's when the government knows that notice the prices going up oh hey we'll give you loans and then what what happened that was bad was that colleges were like oh we're getting loans we can just raise tuition and then we can just have a students get bigger loans because colleges are businesses and tuition is that a main income source right. i think i think the biggest thing that's going to happen that all that will shift this back in the opposite direction that will get that will get employers collaborating with educational institutions or potentially labor or other organizations that can provide educational models is when students

start understanding that that going to college and committing to graduating with twenty seven thousand twenty seven thousand dollars in debt is a really risky proposition operationally when the job market looks like it does today. there was a recent study that the new york times published last year famously that found that twenty two and a half percent of college grads under twenty five with college degrees are unemployed and another twenty two percent are working jobs that don't require their degree. and students are starting to figure out that there are other ways to learn that are there are more meaningful and less expensive than going to schools there are some who have suggested that there is even kind of a grand conspiracy at work here and not necessarily a bunch of you know old men sitting around a table hatching something but. basically as productivity has improved in large part through automation but also because we've off shored

a lot of kinds of jobs this has to do a trade policies and things which is a whole nother rant but but as productivity has improved wages of flattened out pretty much since the one nine hundred eighty s. and so in order to prevent social unrest and mass unemployment what we've done as we've said in you need to stay out of the labor market for another four years we were were intentionally keeping people out of the labor market as a way to suppress unemployment numbers and also it's become its own very profitable little industry thank you very much the bank stores have run up over you know we've got over a trillion dollars in credit card debt more people oh excuse me in student loan debt more people almost student loans than in than the total credit card debt in the united states which is mind boggling so you've got this for profit industry and . the dynamic of education has flipped when reagan came into office eighty percent of an education the cost of tuition was paid for by state local and federal governments today it's twenty percent roughly and the student is making up the that eighty percent that used to be twenty percent so this could become much more

expensive can you speak to that change and whether this might actually just be you know a. way of keeping people out of the job market. i think the the other figure that's that's really important to keep in mind is that the default rate on student loans has been steadily increasing at the end of twenty eleven it was up to nine percent and by the end of q four of twenty twelve it was up to about eleven percent and i haven't seen the numbers for q one twenty thirteen but i imagine that they're higher. and that's that's that's staggering right and when we have all these students with this with the stat that is that is unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy unlike unlike housing debt for example mortgages. that's going to get us to a point where we're going to have to do something and i think that this is i think the i think the the biggest gain of occupy wall street last year was that it

brought this issue to light right. and if nothing else it may be where that there is all of the stat out there all these people who who have the stock who have gone to college and haven't haven't gained anything appreciable from it. you know what we are going to have in two thousand and seven the kansas city fed i think it was announced that we had the second and third quarter of two thousand and seven we've seen a thirty percent drop in housing starts and i was you know on the radio go on ok this is what we saw in one nine hundred twenty seven it preceded the great crash by two years time to be a lot of the stock market this means the bubbles bursting could it be and then the bubble burst of course the housing market completely fell apart and late late two thousand and seven and by two thousand and eight the stock market followed it could it be that we're looking at another bubble here and it's an education bubble and that bubbles going to burst and it's not just the student loan part of it that part will take down the banks but it's also the colleges part we're going to see

companies businesses for problem businesses these these for profit colleges that didn't even exist thirty years ago we're going to see them crashing and burning. that would not surprise me i mean i think we're i think the big those those numbers are all coming together to make it a very scary looking future both for both for students who are going to have to figure out what they're going to do but also for colleges and i think it's not just the for profit colleges that are going to have to really radically. change what they do or or or go away but also a lot of the schools that are that are in the mid tear of institutions the schools at the top the harvard's the prince and the stanford that have that have billion multibillion dollar now it's they're probably going to be ok and the at and the schools at the other end that are that are actually training people with real vocational skills off probably going to be ok as well in fact they're probably going to increase but the schools in the middle like the one that i dropped out of are or are going to be facing some tough questions about whether they're actually

delivering value to their students and i think it's going to if if there's a a structure of education that goes between like you know marketable skills and learning for the sake of learning we're pretty far on the learning for the sake of learning. and i think this will force us to swing back to the to the learning marketable skill side and maybe it'll you know it it if it very well may well over correct and we'll have to swing back. but at the end of the day you've got to learn something that someone will pay you for so that you can put food on the table right yeah absolutely and in your book you lay out a number of great steps and strategies to get there it's a great piece of work dale thanks so much for being with us and thank you it's been great talking with you dale stephens to see this and other conversations of great minds go to our website and conversation of great minds. and that's the way it is today friday march eighth two thousand and thirteen for more information in the

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